How Brands Engage Their Audience for Thanksgiving Day

Thanksgiving is one of the biggest holidays on the calendar for brands as it provides an opportunity to boost engagement with consumers and advertise their new (and discounted) products. This infographic is about Thanksgiving-related activity by U.S. brands on social from 2012 through 2017.

Using a data-backed approach, we look at engaging types of content along with typical examples of each type posted by brands on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. While Facebook was once the preferred method of engagement, it has decreased in popularity as brands move to Instagram, which in 2017 achieved two times more engagement than Facebook and 90 times more than Twitter. On all these platforms, brands were consistently successful in engaging with consumers through posts containing images—these posts garnered 11 times more interactions on Instagram than those containing video or text, as well as five times more on Facebook, and three times more on Twitter.

In 2017, the hospitality industry dominated the conversation surrounding Thanksgiving, with close to 5,000 posts on Facebook alone. However, retail and consumer electronics brands garnered the highest levels of engagement with their posts focusing on discounts, special offers, and family-related themes.

The ideas presented here were mined from Unmetric’s branded content catalog, Discover. With Unmetric Discover, you can search for any topic from over 500 million pieces of branded content, monitor trending topics and hashtags, zero in on the latest and the most engaging content published, and plan campaigns in advance using our calendar of important days, events, and holidays.

This is an article by Martin Daniel. He is a marketing technologist having fun doing digital marketing & data analytics for Unmetric Inc. He spends his working hours analyzing branded content on social media to glean not-so-obvious insights on what it takes to create an engaging piece of content. In his non-working hours, you’ll find him immersed in reading books on business, philosophy, and psychology. You can follow him on LinkedIn.